Personal Aside: The 6 Reasons We Lost to Rio…and More.

Now to last week’s political news covered in handy question-and-answer fashion.

Q. Since Chicago lost the Olympics, who to blame?

A. You mean: whom to thank. FIRST, thank Barack Obama whose address there was full of Himself rather than the cause…touching down like an Almighty Savior, speaking for 20 minutes and flying off into the distance full of arrogance. Consider the context of Obama’s speech: “Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night, people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of the U. S. presidential election. Their interest wasn’t about me as an individual. Rather it was rooted in the belief that America’s experiment in democracy still…” blah blah blah.”

That bit of self-serving prose and me-me-me preening helped do it. SECOND, that South America never had the Olympics before. THIRD, the animosity spawned from jealousy of certain Euro-trash members of the IOC cresting in crass envy and misgiving of this country as the international leader. FOURTH bickering between Chicago and the International Olympic Committee which seriously questioned the financial package (relying at the outset on private financing, turning to public as a last resort when the insurance payments were realized. FIFTH the numbers: The U. S. had only two members on the IOC; Europe with 47 of the 106 members.

SIXTH, the presentation of the 89-year-old multi-millionaire Juan Antonio Samaranch Torello, former president of the IOC who begged that he be allowed to see the Olympics go to South America…conjuring up a tender moment akin to a crippled kid playing an accordion, with a blind little sister proffering a battered hat for coins to keep them from starvation. Those were the major factors.

Q. Did you favor us getting the Olympics?

A. Of course not. The expenditures would go to provide eight years and more of nutrition to the Squid, my substitute for the inadequate word “the machine.” Rather than the inanimate “machine,” the image of the Democratic Squid explains what it the really is: a living organism since its founding by Anton Cermak in 1931, having been in command for 78 years (compared to the USSR which existed 67 years [1922-1991]. A squid had eight arms and two tentacles plus the ability to inject an inky substance to permeate the water and hide itself. Its skin changes color to suit its environment. It maintains the highest survival intelligence among invertebrates. It has the biggest eyes in the animal kingdom; chop off a tentacle and it can grow a new one. Chop off its head and under special circumstances it can regenerate another. The purpose of the big Olympic drive here was to provide nourishment for the Squid—billions of dollars in construction, jobs, contracts from which funds would be directed through its tentacles into its gigantic maw.

Beyond the care and feeding of the Squid, the city can’t afford it. The city has a $200 million deficit; the public school system is $475 million in arrears; the CTA is in the red. While Daley and Pat Ryan have said the Olympics here would cost $5 billion, take a look at the overruns for Millennium Park ($325 million over budget) and the unfinished River Walk (up to $22 million, two times over the budget). On and on. So we’re lucky we were tagged out.

Q. Should Obama have gone to Copenhagen anyhow? Iran is firing missiles, is developing a nuclear bomb and has a second nuclear site; North Korea is doing the same; the Afghanistan war is toppling toward being lost unless we send 40,000 more troops…and the health care debate is going full-tilt. Yet in the middle of all this, he flies to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago for the 2016 Olympics. What was most important?

A. For Obama? Pitching the Olympics for Chicago, of course. He had to go. You must remember, as I’ve always said in these articles, Obama is a creature of the Democratic Squid…so there was really no choice. The issue was the financing and continued nourishment of the Squid for future elections. So nuclear war had to wait. Obama is a loyal Squid hack; he’s a creature of it although media don’t understand this. First things first.

Q. But, hey, Obama’s wife Michelle flew to Copenhagen along with Oprah Winfrey and a special plane full of billionaires. Wasn’t that enough?

A. You still don’t understand that in this town all-local politics-trumps-everything-else, do you? If he hadn’t gone, he’d be the goat in his own backyard and a virtual pariah in his own hometown. Local politics in Chicago always comes first—for presidents as well as mayors and precinct captains. Next you’ll tell me that you believe the 1960 vote fraud that enabled John Kennedy to squeak through, carrying Illinois by a sliver, was done by the Squid to elect a Democratic president.

Q. Great heavens, WASN’T IT?

A. Of course not! The big issue in November, 1960 was that a Democrat-turned-Republican state’s attorney named Ben Adamowski was running for reelection and was planning, if reelected, to launch a top-to-bottom probe of Old Man Daley. Adamowski was a remnant of the Squid and knew everything about it. So, in order to beat Adamowski every Squid hack and precinct captain had orders to defeat him at all costs. The massive push produced an undertow of straight ticket voting that enabled JFK to carry Illinois: a minor side-issue consequence of the successful push to defeat Adamowski who was going to send the Old Man to jail. Again, local-politics-trumps-everything-else.

Q. Turning to one of the lesser issues of the day …the possibility of nuclear war. Don’t you agree that Obama did splendidly at the UN by getting that body to pass an unanimous resolution proposing a nuclear free world with everybody including Russia and China voting for it? It prompted Reagan’s old secretary of state, George Shultz to exult on TV that “Ronald Reagan is looking down from heaven today and smiling!” What do you think of that?

A. I think the excitement of it all must have been too great for the 89-year-old Shultz who should have toddled off to bed early instead of giving TV interviews. After all, he fought Reagan’s use of the word “evil empire” which got the USSR’s attention that he wasn’t kidding. Shultz more than anyone else should have remembered that the UN resolution was non-binding. Which means that resolution had just as much effect as the piece of paper that was handed to Muammar Gaddafi to limit his formal remarks to 15 minutes at most. What did Gaddafi do? He rolled the paper into a ball, tossed it over his shoulder and spoke for one hour and 36 minutes. Shultz was always a détente first guy. Reagan picked him because he had been a labor negotiator like Reagan had been: that’s all.

Q. So you’re not impressed with the resolution?

A, Not in the slightest. While it was being voted on, the Iranians were spinning thousands of centrifuges, developing uranium and shooting off missiles that could hit both Israel and the U. S. and the North Koreans were doing the same thing.

Q. I guess you’re not impressed with the UN.



A. You’re right. Not in the slightest. It’s worse than useless and is harmful to world peace, the nesting place of 3rd world trash who hate our guts, live it up in New York, are free from arrest and hate us for it. The UN misleads people to think that a unanimous resolution means we’re coasting to a nuclear-free world. Maybe as a glorified debating society or simulated Rotary Club it’s okay but for the first time in history we now have a president who is seemingly leading anti-American critics. His performance at the UN equals the rest of his foreign policy stunts performed during the past nine months: the Cairo speech, the probes of CIA interrogators and capitulating to Iran and North Korea. The best thing for us is to re-coin the old slogan: The United Nations out of the U.S. and the U. S. out of the United Nations.

Q. Does that mean you’re an isolationist?

A. That’s a term of derogation. American Nationalist is more like it. Nobody was, strictly speaking, an isolationist, not even Washington who cut a deal with Spain ala Pinckney’s Treaty of 1797 or Coolidge, the architect of Kellogg-Briand which sought to outlaw war. But as an ex-foreign service officer I think we ought to seriously trim back our world policeman commitments recognizing that while international terrorism is a threat, reserving the right to defend ourselves whenever and wherever.

Q. But that’s what Obama told the UN-- other nations shouldn’t count on us as much as they did before.

A. The difference is as I said last week, words mean nothing to Obama since he’s schooled in the linguistics of Marcuse and Chomsky. For one thing, even his linguistics don’t make sense. Example: He said “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional divisions between nations of the South and the North make no sense in an interconnected world, nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War.” French President Sarkozy…the French president, of all people… told him up front and in public at the UN: “We live in a real world not a virtual world. There are two nations doing the exact opposite”—meaning Iran and North Korea. Simply speaking, if Obama’s not duplicitous—which I suspect—he’s as innocent about world affairs as an elementary school-girl. The UN itself springs from World War II; its Security Council reflects a balance of power, NATO and the European economic community from the Cold War.

Q. You suspect he’s duplicitous?

A. I do. Also an egotist of the first order in preference to patriot. Take a look at one of his opening sentences: “For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.” Meaning: Forget what happened during all of the U. S.’s 233 years, just look at its having elected a man like me! Having preened as America’s Redeemer, his real purpose is to become leader not just of the Free World which he’s on the way to selling out, but of the whole world ala Woodrow Wilson. Just look at the nonsense of his rhetoric.

Q. Such as…?

A. Take that campaign speech he made last year in, of all places, Berlin at Victory Gate. The biggest danger, he said, is not terrorism or even nuclear war. Know what it is? “The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.” Last week he used the same analogy saying “the time has come for walls to come down.” But from time immemorial, walls…such as those protecting medieval cities from rampaging armies and mud-slides (as was the case of the wall Joshua sent tumbling down) have had good purposes. Ah but we’re in a different time now, he reminds us. Take a gander at this one: “Old arguments are irrelevant to the challenges faced by our people. Rather, the interests of nations and peoples are shared.” Does he really believe that?

Q. His defenders say he’s pursuing realpolitik, that he’s feinting as the amateur (yet very good) basketball player he is: bobbing right, switching left to beguile the Russians into a new round of sanctions against the Iranians.

A. Listen, we’ve known about the second Iranian hidden nuclear site since the Bush administration as did most other nations. Obama gave that idealistic, Civics:101 speech having known about the second Iranian site since last December. What is Russia’s view? It said it is more open to sanctions than it was in the past but Iran still deserves a chance to explain that the facility is peaceful. And what was Ahmadinejad’s response? It was contemptuous; he was tagged out but just laughed it off. We and others call for sanctions but it’s just words. The time is at hand to take out those nuclear facilities. We won’t do it obviously due to Barack Obama but--.

Q. –but Israel will do the job for us?

A. You mean take out the plants? Surely it’ll try but one problem is distance. Iran’s targets are between 950 and 1,400 miles from Israel, almost the fullest extent its planes can reach even with refueling. At best an Israeli strike would only delay Iran’s nuclear buildup.

Q. Should WE do it?

A. I’ll reserve that until we do the necessary preliminaries. It starts with a high stakes diplomatic bluff, …standard diplomatic procedure since Truman-Ike-JFK-LBJ...even Carter…Reagan, Clinton and the two Bushes. But we won’t with this guy as president since he has all but identified with the 3rd world itself. What could work is an ironclad international boycott and embargo of Iran’s oil exports and gasoline imports but Obama’s concessions and lack of resolve have convinced the international community that he’s not the man to undertake this tough stance. They only have to take a look at the withdrawal of the missile shield from Eastern Europe.

Q. But didn’t that have to do with encouraging the Russians to go to our side on Iran?

A. That view is fatuous. The point is: what Obama got for what he gave up is very slight—just words from the Russian president from which even now he has backtracked. Obama has done this because he wishes as I have said, to parlay himself as the leading figure of the world, making criticisms of the United States that we’ve never seen or heard from a president of the United States and making those statements in forums where he knew it would win him plaudits from Europeans and rogue state dictators around the world. The Poles understand the game: When the missile shield existed, they had what they felt was a guarantee of security. Now it’s been removed unilaterally and they understand why: because of the pressure from Russia. When asked if this would embolden Russia, the Russian president said last week “Russia is always bold. This will make them bolder.”

Q. What safeguards do we have? The IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]? The CIA?

A. The IAEA is a politicized organization, skewed to the 3rd world and anti-American Western and media elites. Its head, Mahamed ElBaradei who supports Muslim countries believes that since Israel has the bomb what’s the big deal about Muslim countries…which means terrorists indirectly…getting it? These views have rewarded him with--can you guess?—the Nobel Prize for Peace. The CIA is a very weak agency. It was certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction but was enraged when George W. Bush invaded it and turned against him, leaking damaging rumors whenever it could. Two years ago it’s National Intelligence Estimate announced this on Iran: “We judge with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

Q. But didn’t Ahmadinejad’s speech cause many at the UN to walk out?

A. Pure media-speak. Only a few did. Russia and China stuck because they frankly enjoy our discomfiture. And why shouldn’t they? They see a president here who has not run as much as a candy store, ridiculing his prior predecessors, romancing their own 3rd world allies, a president with $2-trillion-a-year deficits, trying to implement a hideously expensive universal health care program on top of that. The world community sees also that we are feuding with Israel and trying to make friends with historic enemies—nations that hate our guts.

Q. …Such as?

A. We’re making nicey-nice with Syria, the West Bank and the Muslim world as part of our Obama policies and reading the riot act to Israel about evacuating all settlements or, in his words, “ending the continuation” of settlements on the West Bank. Not long ago none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security aide to Jimmy Carter, suggested that we should shoot down Israeli planes if they pass over Iraq to take out the Iranian nuke facilities…this in order to placate Iran. It sounded crazy when Zbig made the statement but now I’m not so sure it is, given the Third World predilections of this crowd.

Q. Where are we on Afghanistan?

A. Obama’s handpicked top general for Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, has called for 40,000 more troops which has been seconded by his boss, General David Petraeus…but Obama has said that he has to think it over. The problem he has is political. If he steps up the number of troops, his far Left base will grow angry and resolve to sit on its hands in 2010 and 2012. McChrystal told “Meet the Press” last week that he has had only one conversation with Obama via tele-com—and that not very long. Which means that Obama has spent more time on one David Letterman show than he has with his top commander.

Q. Finally, what about the big health care debate?

A. The debate in the Senate Finance committee has failed to settle on a solution. The big contention these days centers around how much is going to be taken from Medicare to pay for Obama’s or Max Baucus’ plan. Obama has said this: “… [W]e’re not going to take a dollar out of the Medicare Trust Fund. We’re going to make sure that benefits are just as strong, if not stronger.” But the hang-up is that no matter what he says, his health plan or the Baucus one will take $100 billion out of Medicare Advantage—which means roughly one-fifth of the seniors who have Medicare Advantage coverage are going to see that coverage gone. The Congressional Budget Office says the one-fifth of the seniors are poor and can’t afford to lose it. So two Democrats, Rockefeller (W. Va.) and Schumer (N.Y.) introduced and lost an amendment to re-insert a public option—a government-run health insurance option. But the public option will make a comeback in the House but is expected to be dropped in Conference. But the whole thing is a mess.

Q. What’s the hang-up?

A. It’s trying to square reality with the 2008 Obama health care promise…that if you like what you have, you can keep it. The Democrats have the 59th vote to block a filibuster with the new Massachusetts senator who replaced Ted Kennedy, Paul Kirk, and could get a 60th from liberal Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine. So their dilemma is this: On one hand they can’t pass a bill with a public option in it and on the other hand without the public option, they would have to cut $100 million from Medicare Advantage which would break the Obama promise he made all during the campaign. So they’re trying to square a circle.

Q. Glum news, isn’t it?

A. On foreign policy, I agree. But domestically? Not all that bad. Consider how much further we’d be toward bankruptcy if those guys were able to pass full-fledged Obama-care.